Morning Break: 'Rock Doc' Busted, Maternal Mental Illness

Health news and commentary from around the Web, gathered by the MedPage Today staff.

Picture this: twins whose birthdays are 39 days apart, a situation which means not only separate birthdays, but possibly separate grades in school. The twins, Carl and David Cowan, were born at 23 weeks and 28 weeks to emergency physician Carl Cowan, Sr., MD, and his wife Elene, who told a Missouri TV station: "It's the hardest thing in my life that I've ever done."

Miami Beach's "Rock Doc", Christopher Gregory Wayne, DO, will has been ordered to pay $1.65 million to Medicare, plus forfeit his home and his Mercedes to the feds. In addition to the fines, Wayne, named Roc Doc by his patients because he wore his bleached blond hair in spikes, will also spend the next 6 years in federal prison -- he's paying the price for Medicare fraud.

In the first of a series examining maternal mental illness, The New York Times reports that postpartum depression is often a prepartum problem and it is more common than often believed.

The FDA placed a partial hold on OncoMed Pharmaceuticals Inc. trials of vantictumab and Fzd8-Fc (subscription required), two novel drugs that target signaling in cancer stem cells. The FDA announcement followed the company's disclosure that it halted enrollment in the trials after "bone-related adverse events were observed in 13% of patients treated with vantictumab and 5% of patients treated with Fzd8-Fc".

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